by Sean Platt
“Of course I believe in West,” Isaac said. Too late, he realized Purcell had been talking about the church.
Isaac moved to correct himself, but Purcell was already rolling his eyes.
“You sound just like Alexa,” he said.
Chapter Ten
The kid wouldn’t leave Stephen alone.
Stephen had picked her up while browsing a deep Beam forum, shortly after procuring his black market replacement canvas. As was usually the case in forums, Stephen found the debate perpetually hot, but the participants lonely people with nothing better to do. It wasn’t a hacking forum, or a writer’s forum — as might make sense in his search for Alexa Mathis. It wasn’t a business or alternative marketing forum. It was more like the Null forum: dedicated to nothing but arguing conspiracies. But unlike the Null forum, the place had been all talk and no show. That’s why he’d moved on: because he was learning nothing about Alexa, and Noah’s warning — if it was, in fact, somehow Noah’s warning — had given him a clear impression: Time is short. Move fast.
So he’d left the forum, but the kid had stuck to Stephen like glue.
After the strange Noah avatar had vanished, Stephen had moved away from Vance Pilloud’s Bontauk ruins just in time to see a black drone fly overhead, pausing where he’d made his connection. The Noah avatar he’d encounter on the old canvas might have been anything, but it was right about one thing: Someone was after Stephen York. York could feel the truth of that inside himself — some bit of his old firewall code gone missing, run off to tattle.
So after the drone had moved on, he’d cabled a small Fi attachment to the unearthed fiber line and marched a quarter mile away from the ruins. Using a simple spoof, he launched a refractive echo search on his secondhand handheld that rode beneath the weather control. Then, pinging the hoverbots under the first layer of the Lattice, Stephen watched the drone approach. Eventually, as expected, he saw a second drone show to the east. Both were relaying data: information York couldn’t decode, but that seemed to be in couplets. They were probably relaying coordinates. If so, there’d be a third drone out there somewhere, the three working together to triangulate on something.
Given what he’d felt in his own firewall’s tattletale signature, that something was probably his Beam ID.
The drone’s AI must have been satisfied (or just confused) by his jury-rigged setup because it flew away. That wouldn’t last forever. Whoever was after him, they’d have modern-day information — probably top-tier modern information — whereas Stephen’s was nearly obsolete.
But as one of the network’s creators, York did know something that had never really been public knowledge: The Beam hadn’t actually replaced Crossbrace; it had been built atop Crossbrace. Crossbrace, in turn, had been built atop the Internet. That meant that as old as York’s knowledge was, it was still valuable — because all that old stuff was still in existence, buried deep down.
So he’d gone out. He’d begun his search for Alexa, just as “Noah” had instructed. And this kid — this stubborn, overly eager kid — was his tagalong reward.
Stephen watched the kid’s avatar as they traversed the deep Beam. She stuck out like a human in this place. But the fact that she walked and talked at all among all of this granddaddy AI was at least something worthy of York’s respect.
“You really think you can find her?” the kid asked.
Her voice (artificial, probably nothing like her voice in the real world) was tinny and annoying. But considering that Stephen wasn’t immersed and was simply sitting on the floor staring at a screen, the fact that the kid had found a way to talk out loud to him at all was impressive. She claimed not to be a hacker — just a devout Alexa Mathis fan — but she’d still effortlessly cobbled a floating, reverberating larynx out of the air-filtering nanos flying through the shitty hotel room Stephen had rented with his spoofed ID. The fact that it sounded like anything other than shaking robots made her nearly an adept, in Stephen’s mind. And the way she seemed to have programmed those bots using subtle flashes of his canvas screen? That was downright spooky.
Stephen answered her aloud, having already swept the room for listening devices.
“No, I don’t think I can find her.”
“But you came here. You came to this cluster.”
“I did.”
“Why won’t you immerse?” the kid asked. “It would be easier to navigate if you were in here with me.”
Stephen had no idea who the kid was or what she looked like in the real world, so he’d formed his own idea. He knew only from the age restrictions on her ID that she was younger than the age of Choice, and her voice made him imagine someone aged maybe sixteen or seventeen. Possibly with short, punky hair and a backward cap, as befitting a proper cyber punk.
“This way is easier for me.”
York emphasized for me to remind the girl that she hadn’t been invited on this trip. She’d been tagging along like a lost puppy through three digital clusters already, his search feeling as futile as locating a specific grain of sand on a beach. It wasn’t just painstaking; it was downright futile. He’d explained that to the kid, but still she insisted on following him. Despite his best efforts, he’d been unable to shake her. It was both annoying and troubling. He was supposed to hide from a powerful entity with malicious intentions…but he couldn’t get away from one dumb teenager who’d wouldn’t leave his heels.
“You’re slowing us down, trying to watch code on your screen,” the kid said. “We could search for Alexa faster if you got down here and actually talked to some of them.”
“Talked to whom?”
“Packets, silly.”
The off-handed, it’s-no-big-deal way she said “packets” made Stephen’s skin crawl. Nobody talked about packets as anything but groups of ones and zeros.
“You really should go,” Stephen said. “I have no idea what I’m looking for, but I know I’m not going to find it.”
The floating voice box beside Stephen’s ear gave an excellent imitation of an amused laugh. “Alexa is my life. I don’t care if it takes forever. Your questions about her in the forum were the first new things we’ve seen in…well…ever. I can tell we’re on to something.”
“I am. I am on to something.”
Hearing his own voice, Stephen flinched. He’d been trying to make a point about this being his mission and not hers, but what he’d just said probably smacked of optimism.
“Exactly!” the girl voice said. “So come on down here!”
“Why are you talking about packets like living things?”
“Because they are. You just have to speak their language.”
“Are you sure you’re not a hacker? Not a Beam adept?”
“Are you?”
“I’m just a guy.”
“Well,” she huffed, “I’m just an Alexa fan.”
“But you talk like an adept. Can you really…talk to packets?” He felt stupid saying it.
“Stephen,” she said, “will you please just — ”
“How do you know my name?”
“It’s all over your face.”
“You can’t see my face.”
“Not that face.” She laughed.
“What’s your name?” He hadn’t cared to know, but now that she’d said his name, their footing seemed uneven.
“Kimmy.”
“I can’t immerse, Kimmy. Don’t you get it? I don’t have a rig.”
Kimmy paused. Then she said, “Can I try something?”
“Um…”
“Oh, come on,” she said, her voice teasing.
Stephen sighed, sensing futility. “Fine.”
Something stirred in the room, disorienting Stephen. At first, he thought he might pass out, but he wasn’t dizzy; the room really was starting to swim and spin. The walls seemed to crack and splinter, and a moment later he found himself somewhere new. It was a world of blue-and-white lines, tracks of light seeming to run hither and yon, vehicles of some kind zipping overh
ead and all around. It looked less like a true digital immersion and more like a parody — what people a hundred years ago thought a virtual world might look like, maybe.
Looking at his immediate surroundings, York found himself in some sort of a large transit, like an elevated mag train. The transit’s car — and, now that he looked, the world beyond the windows — was more like a wireframe than something solid. He could see the world shooting past underfoot, as if he were in a glass cage with glowing edges.
To one side was a teenage girl with medium-length brown hair wearing a skintight suit. The suit was all black crossed with light-blue lines. Looking down, he saw a similar outfit on himself.
“How did you do that?” he asked the girl, blinking.
“Do what?”
“How did you bring me here?”
“You were already here. All I did was let you see it.”
“But how?”
She smiled. “It’s pretty simple to see things that are actually happening, silly.”
Balls of light blurred past outside the windows — some large, some small. One by one, the larger balls landed on the digital, blue-lined ground and transformed into giant mechanical insects that began rolling and shambling about. The smaller balls never seemed to land. Instead, they hovered near the larger objects as if accompanying them. They were flying around the transport, too, and as Stephen looked, Kimmy regarded one that had entered their cabin with suspicion.
“What are those things?”
“The big ones are packets,” she said. “You could see them before, couldn’t you?”
York wasn’t sure if he should nod. He’d seen the code, and he’d recognized the things as AI in varying degrees of seniority — some dating all the way back to the buried Internet. But to York, before he’d been brought into whatever this was, they’d been ones and zeros. Seeing the packets now, it wasn’t nearly as absurd to think that the girl could talk to them.
“The littler ones?” She pointed at the ball she’d been watching with a raised eyebrow. “Those are micropackets. They’re barely intelligent. More like stray bits of code. They’ll try and attach to each other around you because they’re like halves of an equation that want to solve themselves. The pairs they form are almost always random and unhelpful, but you need to watch out because paired micropackets can look and act a lot like AIs. They’ll answer questions, for instance. They can run basic routines. Every AI in here has a purpose, but packets are actually integrated, whereas paired micropackets just seem integrated.” She laughed. “I’m sorry. You know all this already, don’t you?”
“It’s fine,” said Stephen, not really knowing it — in these terms, anyway — at all.
The micropacket Kimmy had been eyeing moved closer. She began to swat at it like a troublesome insect, but then another plopped into the transport, and the two snapped together like magnets.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Look at that. Half-screen pixel correction and half-external drive boot protocol. How is that useful?” She turned to the pair and kicked at it. “Get out of here!”
The microfragment seemed to elongate and stand. It said, “Where are you going?”
But Kimmy swatted again, and it dispersed and blew into aether.
Stephen had no idea what to do. He didn’t even know if he was still in his shitty, rundown room or if she’d somehow sucked him into another world. All of what she’d said made sense in concept; he’d seen recombinant AI before, but even Noah had seen them as emergent intelligence — not pests, the way Kimmy saw them. But then again, he was now seeing his life’s work through a new lens. Running across native AI from behind a desk wasn’t like walking and talking with it on its home turf.
“That thing raised a good question,” Stephen said, looking where the microfragments had been. “Where are we going?”
“Not anywhere they suggest. Listen to things like that, and you’ll end up stuck in a hole for sure.”
“A hole?” Stephen had never heard the expression, but then again he’d been out of commission for over thirty years. Surely the lingo had evolved, along with the network.
“A loop,” she said. “Holes are self-reinforcing because they’re driven by faulty AI — crazy packets, is a good way to view them. Being in one is like being in a Chinese finger trap. Normally, people will try and report holes to the SysOp, but in most cases the SysOp is AI, so you can’t tell for sure that you’re not still in the hole, talking to the same busted packet.”
Stephen looked out the digital window, feeling buried below seventeen layers of lack of understanding. And to think: He’d believed he was an expert here…having invented the place and all. He found himself watching what passed for ground, wondering if a hole would look like a huge pit, and if it was as doomed a place as Kimmy made it sound.
“It’s fine,” she said, seeming to read his mind. “You get stuck in a hole, you just need to break the loop by doing something the AI doesn’t expect. The hard part is knowing you’re in the loop to begin with.”
Stephen sat on a blue-lined digital bench, feeling tired, wondering if he was himself at all — if this was his body beneath him, or if he was asleep in the real world, dreaming. There was a brief moment of claustrophobia — a sense that if Kimmy wanted, she could keep him here forever — but then it passed. This mission was fucked no matter how he sliced it. Whatever Noah thought was stalking York, maybe it would be easier to lie down and let it get him.
“I never noticed that before,” Kimmy said, her eyebrows bunching. “Have you always had that?”
York looked down, seeing her gaze settle on his chest. A dim light grew from his middle, as if something was buried below his skin.
Seeing his surprise, Kimmy said, “It might be nothing. Just an artifact.”
“What did you think it was?”
“Code like that? The kids I know call it a boson. Like a birthmark, but cooler.” She shrugged. “They say SerenityBlue has one.”
“Boson?”
“Named after the Higgs boson in physics,” she said. “You know…the God particle.”
Chapter Eleven
September 18, 2042 — Quark Infinity Spire
Everyone at Quark was celebrating. In the other room, Noah could hear the champagne corks popping. He could hear laughter. He could even (and this was nice, despite his mood) hear Stephen York’s distinctive chuckle. That particular sound was as strange as it was unique because nobody really heard it. York was an excellent worker, and he was a good friend insofar as Noah had friends. But despite having all the professional satisfaction, thrill of discovery, and money that a person could ever want, Stephen didn’t seem happy at all. And laughter? That never happened.
Still, it was nice to hear evidence of the man’s smiling. At times like this (when something had temporarily been accomplished, when the pressure was briefly off, when even the likes of Noah could permit a short rest), Noah had to admit that the man deserved better.
Stephen deserved better than Quark.
And Stephen definitely deserved better than Noah West.
Noah listened to the sounds from the front room for another few minutes then walked back to his office. He sat at his desk and called up the big screen on his far wall. Using gloves, he manipulated windows from across the room. He called up a few of the big news sites, knowing that today — and maybe only for today — he’d find only good news about himself and his company. The hype machine had done its job. The launch of Crossbrace, like anything, had its good and bad. In time, people would begin finding the network’s faults. But for now, the hangover of lead-up was still colliding with the splendor of the reality. There were no big bugs, and the team seemed to have allowed plenty of room in the network’s capacity. The big board was showing no significant latency or traffic jams. The distributed processors were effectively shuttling loads to nodes with capacity, letting it all run according to plan.
For today only, the NAU was basking in the newfound splendor of the Crossbrace network.
For today only, all of the news sites were as excited as the population: dazzled by Crossbrace’s promised abilities on one hand, blown away by the features Quark had kept secret until now on the other hand.
The headlines proclaimed Quark to be revolutionary.
They said that da Vinci, Edison, and Jobs were nothing compared to Noah West.
They said that Crossbrace would redefine life now that everything talked to everything — and every step of those interconnected processes were intelligent.
It was all very nice, and for maybe five minutes Noah let himself be pleased by the press they’d garnered with the system’s launch. He couldn’t have asked for it to go better.
Except that it should be better, and Noah damn well knew it.
Crossbrace was currently knocking the NAU’s socks off, and as more peripherals rolled out, those socks would continue to fly. As the new AI got to know itself better, Crossbrace’s accuracy and abilities would grow. The Internet of Things was reasonably complete within the city, but that IOT would grow in the coming months as more people fed the system data. That would improve the network’s knowledge — and hence its ability to serve — even further.
But Crossbrace only blew people’s socks off because they didn’t know better. Because they didn’t have Noah’s vision.
To Noah, Crossbrace now seemed a neat trick — embedding billions of sensors in the physical environment and enlisting users as mobile sensors who’d further fill out the IOT and teach the network its business. And the new AI? That was a neat trick too.
But in Noah’s mind, what Crossbrace could do wasn’t real magic. It was only illusion. Crossbrace hadn’t changed the world. It had merely slapped a new face on the old world, making it appear as something new.
Maybe people would see that soon, or maybe it would take them longer. But, Noah knew, they’d see it someday. The wondrous always eventually became taken for granted. How many times had Noah seen that? Even the engine in the tractor his father had used to plow fields had once seemed like a marvel. But had his father ever praised its wonder, constantly amazed that a machine could do the work done worse by a team of mules a century earlier? Not at all. Instead, Dad was always swearing about the tractor. Banging on it with wrenches when it hiccuped, wondering why the stupid fucking thing couldn’t just work properly once in a while.
